Democratic Party backed on voter lists
11:40 AM 3/21/03
Phil Brinkman State government reporter

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin didn't violate state campaign finance laws when it solicited and received free voter lists from legislative staffers, the attorney for the state Elections Board has concluded.

In an opinion released Friday, attorney George Dunst said questions remain about whether staffers broke state ethics laws by working on state time to convert constituent databases into campaign tools used by the party in get-out-the-vote drives.

But once the lists were created they became public records, available to the party or anyone else who requested them, Dunst wrote.

The 19-page opinion responds to a complaint filed more than a year and a half ago by Don Fish, who managed the party's voter file from 1998 to 2000.

Fish alleged the party conspired to use employees of the taxpayer funded Senate and Assembly Democratic caucuses to create the lists, which contained not only voters' names and addresses, but other information whose sole purpose was to aid in electioneering.

That information included such things as constituents' political preferences and their willingness to donate money to a candidate, volunteer on a campaign or put up a yard sign.

The lists, compiled from county and municipal clerks around the state supplemented by caucus research, saved the party tens of thousands of dollars in data entry costs and should have been reported as an in-kind contribution, Fish argued.

Fish, who left the party after trying to blow the whistle on the practice, said the scheme was widely acknowledged among members of the party's Coordinated Campaign, a consortium of top elected Democrats on the national and state level.

The party's attorney, David Hase, said because the lists were prepared by state employees they were public information and did not constitute a "contribution" under state campaign finance laws. As such, the party did not have to report them to the state Elections Board, Hase said.

Dunst agreed, noting legislators have collected names and addresses of constituents for more than 20 years. That the lists obtained by the Democratic Party also contained political information useful in recruiting supporters didn't make them any less a public record, Dunst said.

"DPW/CC were no more obligated to pay for that information than any other requester would have been obligated to pay for the same information," Dunst wrote in the opinion, written in advance of the board's Wednesday meeting when the Fish complaint is due to be taken up.

Dunst noted the Legislature has since adopted new rules prohibiting staffers from working on databases intended for campaign purposes while on state time. But that rule, adopted Oct. 11, 2001, wasn't in effect at the time covered by the Fish complaint.

Fish said Dunst "overlooked completely" the alleged conspiracy. Far from simply asking for existing records, Fish said, the Democratic Party was integrally involved in designing the database and coordinating the data entry with caucus employees.

"I don't understand how something that would not exist were it not for this conspiracy .